Nonfiction by Timothy L. Marsh

A sunny June day in St. John’s means a school trip to Signal Hill so students can admire the scope of their city in marvelous Mother Nature Technicolor.

The bus reads Eastern School District and looks like the half-tractor, half-Panzer kind of bus that children took to school in 1979, which also happens to be the year I was born nearly three decades ago this easy jobless afternoon.

I am eating McDonald’s at the top of the hill where a man named Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless signal and then shortly thereafter the Nobel Prize.

The children surge from the bus, all squeals and skips in their wonderful youth. They strike the ground and stun the air, flow up and over the parking lot, plunge into Cabot Tower—thirty sets of fuel-injected legs firing on all summer cylinders.

The children are at the height of the low-maintenance life. There is nothing wrong in their lives that can’t be repaired with five minutes of play. They are twenty or thirty years from the disease of nostalgia or any deep long breath born in a car beside a perpetual quarter-tank of gas and two Final Notice statements sitting in the front seat like silent angry wives who’ll never leave you no matter how bad it gets.

There is another man like me up here. He is eating a hamburger in his car and sometimes talking to himself. He is wearing an exceptional slouch in a brand new Sedan adorned with little balls of white sunlight that are too bright to look into.

He is parked next to me and we are both slouch-eating hamburgers and occasionally talking to ourselves while watching thirty schoolchildren horsing around on Cabot Tower which always looks cold no matter how much sun it gets.

There is one boy standing by himself at the east side of the tower.

The boy has seen something in the distance and is very excited as if something unimaginable is sailing his way.

He is leaning over the side of the observation deck where the whole world begins or ends at the fractured edge of Newfoundland. His classmates are on the other side of the tower looking out across St. John’s.

The boy is pointing and calling for them frantically, begging them to look at what he sees.

Timothy L. Marsh currently resides in Bali, Indonesia, where he works as a curriculum developer. In the last year his writing has appeared or been accepted in The Crab Orchard Review, The Newfoundland Quarterly, The New Quarterly, The Evansville Review, Connotation Press, Waccamaw Journal and Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, among others. His awards include a 2010 fellowship and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and a 2009 Arts Jury Award from the City Council of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

This interview took place over email in the summer of 2009. Natasha Marin is a community arts organizer. She believes that art is not only made, but also happens naturally– that art can go beyond its own reality into a more profound way of being and seeing the world that can change a person’s life. Working in collaboration with others to create transformative environments for art-making is her passion. She works at 45WEST STUDIOS in downtown Vancouver and lives with her partner, Kelly and their daughter, Roman, in Seattle. Find her on the web at www.mikokuro.com.

What is Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea?

In many ways, Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea (MKMT) defies definition. It is a form of cultural expression which constantly changes and adapts to the people who participate in its manifestation. And those people are different every time the event occurs. But let me give it a shot:

MKMT is a conceptual art project that I designed over the course of 2 years which involves creating an interactive multimedia installation space during which guests and participating artists co-create an environment rich in creative possibility that engages each individual on a multi-sensory level.

Halloween Midnight Tea featuring Shree Joglekar & Jui Mhatre.

MKMT is a place of Genuine Encounter, where all people (regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, or education level, etc.) are allowed to play and explore their relationship to creativity, community and spirituality within the context of an art happening.

Inspired by the principles of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, MKMT is a direct response to Pop art and its aftershocks, in that the separation between the art work and the viewer, is non-existent. People become the art that they are witnessing. Dividing lines disappear. The viewer is an essential component, rather than a passive consumer of the work.

Why midnight?

Midnight has for a very long time, been regarded by people of culturally diverse backgrounds to be a transformative and magical time. If zero represents the mathematical equivalent of pure potential, then midnight would be the temporal equivalent.

Tell me how you came about the idea to do the tea.

It probably sounds a bit facile, but I really do believe that art is transformative. I also believe that all of us are connected. As such, I believe that rituals emerge from our communities quite naturally as a function of our human-ness and that healing requires the full participation of the healer and those who are seeking healing. The Midnight Tea project came to me as the natural conclusion to the problem of how to bring people together for all of these purposes in an anti-exclusive environment wherein creative transformation would be possible.

Why performance art, specifically butoh?

When an artist is too poor to hire a body to move on her behalf as if a puppet or in whatever way the creative mind can imagine, the artist must herself become the performer. I am this sort of reluctant performer. It just so happened that I was studying butoh with Diana Garcia-Snyder in Seattle at about the same time I was getting my studio space settled in Vancouver. Diana was the proverbial teacher who appears when the pupil is ready. I learned from her that the body can find its fetal rhythm and/or ancestral self through movement of this kind. There is also something darkly seductive about the way the body moves when animated by the butoh-spirit. In many ways, it has allowed me to unlock previously unknown valences of my innermost self.

What is Afro-Caribbean butoh?

If butoh is a form of movement, wherein the body locates its own fetal state, then Caribbean butoh (as Caribbean-ness also involves African-ness) is the culturally “Caribbean” version of this traditionally Japanese dance form. Butoh began as a response to ballet, which I studied for twelve years. Ballet is about form, butoh is about non-form or liminality. Even with my predelection for contrast and chiaroscuro, I prefer the gray in a black and white world.

What is your art’s relationship to poetry?

Poetry allows the mind to create magic between words. A good poem is like a roadmap into a new experiential paradigm. I use poetry in the form of video, sound installation, text as illustration and in its more traditional forms as a means of incantation during the Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea events.

Do you feel inside or outside pressure to do one medium or another? If so, how do you transcend that pressure?

The white men who run the world have a long history of being terribly unimaginative. For years, this has been disguised by the tendency (dare I say “habit”) to appropriate other cultures’ innovations. Fortunately, I recognize this and resist it.

Wow, that’s so loaded. I know it is complex and has a long, deep backstory, but explain why it is important to you to point that out.

Culture is a fluid, living thing. We must find ways to recognize each other and each other’s work without dismantling it or inserting it into our already flawed cultural narratives. Recognition is the first step in validation. When you validate cultural differences, you are demonstrating a certain level of respect. This *is* pretty loaded– like dissertation-loaded, so I will say one last thing: anthropological gazing is self-revelatory. Everything we see is about us because we are the “them” that we want to put outside of our comfort zones.

It bothers me sometimes that I feel very alone in my work– as though I am creating the path that I am walking– but I am reassured when I see how my approach affects non-traditional art consumers who might otherwise dismiss art as an elitist luxury, rather than the transformative exchange it has the potential to be.

November 2009 Midnight Tea featuring Deidre Gantt as Dirty Mary.

How does that affect your feelings of aloneness?

It is very likely that my isolation, real, felt or otherwise, is the basis for my work in this platform. Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea is a mandala. It requires one’s full participation. Only then can it move the participant into the next dimension. In the ovum-state, the tea is a poem. An arrow-like intention, which goes out into the cosmic net of potential as the proverbial voice in the darkness, from which “reality” manifests. It is the collective art of 12 potentials who are animated within a narrative that I co-create along with Featured Artists, Special Guests, and everyone else involved in the project. The work in its entirety emerges from this place of real or perceived separateness so in every way possible, it attempts to make connections, find commonalities, and transform an event into a new paradigm of shared, yet individualized experiences of art.

Does it help your process to see how your work affects non-traditional art consumers?

I am interested in the patternless world of chaos. My work strives to be at all times both passionate and organic. I am using the word organic as the antonym for “contrived” here. I can see the tea in the realm of possibility in my mind before it happens in “real life” but it always is something different than I imagined. I allow this to increase and expand my perspective. I welcome it!

Why do we even create art? Is there a fragile hope inside each attempt to outlast ourselves? To inspire or interrogate? The tea doesn’t want a certain experience as much as it wants a natural one. Nature has sprezzatura mastered already. A rock balancing, becomes a haiku. A field of red flowers, turns into a song. Life as a human being in flesh and wonder and despair is archived in art.

Midnight Tea Guest, Jina Anika.

Having done a tea with you, I witnessed the transformative power of the performance. How have guests (and guest performers) said the tea affects them in their everyday lives?

Well, my dear … you tell me! I wouldn’t be able to speculate on anyone else’s experience of the tea. For me, it is a practice, a mantra of sorts which is helping me to understand many, many things. The realm of the unknown is so deeply and enticingly alluring, one can swoon into the magic of potential realities so easily at midnight, maybe it’s the moon– so much like an x-ray of the sun turned bone-white in the black sky.

When I am able to immerse myself in my passion– the creation of spaces like Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea– the feeling itself is transcendental. In those moments, I care about nothing else.

I know the tea is elaborately organized. Do you want to talk about the structure and the rationale behind the ritual?

I am constantly revising and having new ideas on how to make the tea. It is like culture– always in flux.. It is not static. I have to remain vigilantly “awake” to see what is working and what isn’t. It also helps to get honest feedback from my guests and the other artists who are contributing to its creation. It is commonly said of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, that the excitement, the passion and the aesthetic fulfillment for the host is in all the planning that goes into the actual tea ceremony. I believe this is true. When you devote yourself completely to bringing about a transformative experience for someone else, you often find yourself changed– made lighter and more complete at the same time.

What do you love most about doing the tea?

I love the play– the improvisation– the giving up and giving in part, where I release my control of all the planning, all the details and let the guests create the reality they are in the midst of. Seeing how each individual’s perspective contributes to the outcome (what in the end is the Tea Experience) is mind-blowing, validating and inspiring all at the same time. And strangely and luckily, it seems that only the coolest and most engaging people are drawn to this project!

What is one of the most memorable or profound understandings you’ve achieved?

People need magic in their lives. People need art in their lives. It’s difficult to receive. We have to practice being guests. Ritual allows us to be our better selves. And holding a hot cup of tea among strangers is in and of itself, an experience.

Talk about collaboration. I know it is a passion of yours. How does affect your creative self/process?

Collaboration is how everything worthwhile in my life has happened. I haven’t accomplished anything by myself. An idea is only a thought until you assemble a task force to bring it into fruition. Working with other artists allows me a glimpse into their minds, their process, the very essence of who they are. It also challenges me to do my best work because I am not accountable on my own.

Collaboration is collective witnessing. It allows us to support and validate each other while working towards a common creative goal. I have been fortunate enough to work with artists from a variety of disciplines. I have never felt that any collaborative endeavor was a waste of my time. Naturally, some encounters are more fulfilling than others, but people are different and thus the chemistry between people varies. Sometimes it is rewarding on a level so fundamental, your former self becomes unrecognizable.

August 2009 Midnight Tea featuring Anastacia Tolbert. Pictured: Natasha Marin as Goldface Miko.

What about the people – how do you choose who you’ll work with?

The people who are supposed to work on this project seem to find me. It is the curious, the seeking, the hopeful and the brave to whom I am calling. I, by myself, can only do so much. But when working with others who can contribute an entirely different skill set, the project seems to have limitless potential.

What about the audience? Do you have regulars, or is it different each time? What are their reactions?

We do have a few regulars, but mostly the people who come are different every time. Their reactions are like their perspectives — varied, yet all beautiful and honest. Fear is part of nature.

November 2009 Midnight Tea. Pictured: Go, the Bound One (Guest, Malissa Kent).
What is your ultimate ambition for this project?

My vision is small. My scope only belongs to me. I want this project to go beyond the individual imaginings of those who are a part of it. For me, fame would be lovely (admittedly the song from the ’80s plays occasionally in my head), but knowing that what I’m doing is real and affects individuals on a personal level is enough to satisfy my ego.

How can people support your work?

They can visit the event website www.mikokuro.com and poke around. There they can sign up to volunteer, be a guest, donate funds and/or be a sponsor on the website. Sponsorship is easy, anyone of any income level can do it! Visitors can also get a sneak peek of the project documentary that is forthcoming! They can also purchase the full-color exhibition catalog of all the teas from the first cycle of the project, complete with essays and poems and images, for $65.
Fantastic. Thank you!

All photo credits are (c) Dafang Jiang, 2009

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

However he be: drunk, sober, slipping strippers dollar bills, belligerent with a large group of men who look like him, I pray the Lord his soul to keep.

Deliver him from the shape-shifting gene that lies in all Black men. Let him remain bald, dark, and 6’3”. Lead him not toward the ability to stretch taller, shrink shorter, glamour his skin lighter, or insta-grow a full head of dreads.

Lord, I pray that his soap opera evil twin does no wrong tonight.

Please keep him from being Belled, from being felled by police guns moving faster than axes to chop down dark and scary forests and make newspapers of him.

And lead him not to be Dialloed, black wallet in his back pocket is not made of morph-leather; it does not become a gun. Though he does make-believe guns with his pointer finger and thumb, please shine a little light on the police so that they see his hands, just hands.

O Lord, save him from brown-skinned concrete cannibals, shape shifters who, at night, blend with the cement they stand on, harden like stone. Save him from their thirst for their own kind.

This Lord I seek: Please let him fit the description of a president and have a police escort home so that we can dwell in our home all the days of our life together.

Amen.

Hear the author read this poem.

LaToya Jordan is a poet from Brooklyn, NY. She lives with her English-teacher-husband and two cats in a tiny apartment with an infestation of books. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.

The Splinter Generation is dedicated to providing a venue for aspiring and established artists. We accept contributions of work in any fine art medium including painting, drawing, performance art, video, printmaking, photography, textiles and sculpture. Literary comics also welcome. We have no prescribed style and will consider both representational and abstract work. However, the work should speak to the overall generational theme of the journal, whether directly or indirectly.

For each issue we will select a single artist to feature. We ask for one time publication rights and permission to archive the images on the site. We will consider previously published art as long as the artist has retained the rights.

Artwork should be professionally documented. Review our complete artwork guidelines below carefully before submitting.

Visual Art Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be in JPEG format and attached to an e-mail which contains the following:

Name
E-mail address
Street Address
Website link if applicable
List of works by title, medium and size of work and publication history (Be sure to tell us if the work is “Not For Sale” - NFS)
Artist statement (150 words maximum)
Short biography of the artist (75 words maximum)
Send 3-5 works in JPEG file format, 600 x 800 pixels or smaller, 300 dpi, as an attachment to an e-mail message. Alternatively, you may provide direct links to 3 - 5 specific images on your website.
For video, provide up to two Vimeo or YouTube links to clips 1 to 3 minutes in length, along with information on the full length and any production credits.
• In the subject line, put “Art Submission” and the title of the work.
Please follow the guidelines carefully, or your work will not be reviewed, without notice to you.

Send the artwork (and only artwork) attached to an e-mail addressed to splintergenart@gmail.com. Those artists selected for publication will be notified within 30 days.

If the work is subsequently published in another venue, we ask that the publication in Splinter Generation be acknowledged.

Note: Splinter Generation does not charge commission for work sold as a result of exposure in the magazine.

We look forward to viewing your work!

Art by Andy Warner

This cold has taught me
about the nature of souls.

Although I have known
a long time ago that the body
is meant to be a sieve for
the soul fermenting inside,

I am still surprised by the fog
of breath coming out of my mouth.
So dense. It seems that I am not the only one
who is exhaling in this frozen yard.

*This poem first appeared in Fine Lines, Jan 2008

Kristine Ong Muslim has been published in numerous publications worldwide, including A cappella Zoo, Beeswax Magazine, GlassFire Magazine, Grasslimb, Narrative Magazine, Pank, The Pedestal Magazine, and Southword. She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and twice for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award.

at 5:30 in the afternoon she fumbled out of the dark bedroom,

into a kitchen.
an example of highly unusual fauna.

she googled the word kerosene, the combustible hydrocarbon liquid kind.
drank the meltlight meaning, came alive at that fellow feeling.

with Lower Heat Value.

the beautiful women in pearls, in stethoscope, in liquid caps, in crude
oil, in jet engineburn.

the beautiful women at record high cost, with subsequent leakage.
mixed into particulate matter.  Domestic.

legitimate contamination.  the smell of freedom.  in crude
sentient surcharge.

once placed in its own genus, it lost its ability to fly.

Talia Reed is a public school teacher in rural Indiana.  Her chapbook This Admirable Miry Clay was recently published from dancing girl press.  Her poems have appeared in several literary magazines including Main Street Rag, Wicked Alice, Tipton Poetry Journal, Switchback, Moria, and Arsenic Lobster. This past summer she was a participant in the Favorite Poem Project Summer Institute for Educators at Boston University.

Take a look at what we’ve previously published to get a sense of what we’re seeking. But we can tell you this much right now: we exist because we want to feature the best new voices we can find — voices that aren’t just of the moment but will still be meaningful when future generations look back at the journal. Obviously we’re seeking work that is based on the written word,  but feel free to use links, video, audio, or any other tools the internet has to offer. That could be cool. Or it could be just as cool to send us brilliant traditional work. Just make sure you wrap us up in what you have to say. Make us feel. Make us think. And help us advance what literature can be online.

For more on why we call ourselves The Splinter Generation, go here.

To submit, please follow these guidelines:

Email submissions to splintergeneration@gmail.com with the genre (fiction, poetry or nonfiction) and the word submission in the subject line. For example, a poetry submission should have a subject line that reads “Poetry Submission.”

A brief cover letter with your name, year you were born, city of residence, and titles of submission is required.

Previously published work may be considered, but please let us know the details of the previous publication in the cover letter.

What besides the white roofs of school buses,
powder blue power plants alongside oxbow lakes,

unmanned aircraft and empty envelopes?

Purple martins in the smoke of Blue Ridge
Mountain Parkways, burning Nevadan back country.

Offshore oil derricks drilling alone at night.

Orange tongues lap at the cornfield maze,
tourists admire Mt. Rushmore and photograph

Crazy Horse or ground zero, other unfinished icons.

I tongue the glue and fix the portrait of a bird
beside the space for someone’s name.

What are we calling them?

A sniper on the roof, another undercooked image
on the television and only two seconds

before the boy explodes.

Another ice shelf collapses, another
dinner party ends in advance.

Do you see your own impossible place?

It’s there, resting with Byzantium
and thinking of Atlantis

or extinct ocean floors

collecting seashells in the Sahara,
Inuit walk barefoot across the Bering Strait

beneath hallucinations of an iron earth,

Blackhawk and Apache helicopters,
over unnamed islands in the Atlantic

and classified home numbers in the Capital.

diego báez reviews music for HeaveMedia and debut books of poetry for Growler. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review and Granta (online). He lives and writes in Newark, NJ.

Over Easter brunch her mother-in-law inquired,
Why haven’t you given me any grandbabies yet?
The eyes of her in-laws fixated on her. She smiled,
ripped open a dinner roll, sliced the head off of
the lamb shaped butter and replied: I swallow.

Sharon Cicilian shares her life with three farm animals: Paul the husband, Queen Scruffy the cat, and Snoop a Loop the dog. She is completing her MFA at Goddard College.

When Zooey says I do, I close my eyes and watch dark clouds drift across my eyelids. On the sidelines in my sky blue dress, I clutch my bouquet of tulips, my hands beginning to sweat. I wish I could see her face, but I’m confronted instead with the elegant knot of her hair, remembering how I braided it for years, all our sleepover nights. A few curls fall on her neck and blow slightly toward me in a goodbye wave.

She’s saying her vows, the careful words she practiced last night with me as Zach’s stand-in. Wearing the heels we were trying to break in, we stood holding hands on the balcony of our apartment, half-giggling as she recited love-words.

The reception music pulses on, relentless. I’m sitting at table nine, nibbling alternately on a dinner roll and my fingernails. Zooey has been sailing from table to table, her big white boat of a dress carrying her through the waters of heavily lipsticked aunts and tipsy college friends. At the sweetheart table, her tomato bisque is getting cold. Zach walks along beside her, smiling like he always does, his fingers pressed against the small of her back.

A man sits down next to me—Ray Walsh, according to his place card. He gently removes my tulips from his bread plate. I blush and mumble sorry.

He introduces himself to me, his handshake firm. He tucks his hair behind his ears in a self-conscious way, and I want to tuck myself back there too, to lie inside his hoop earring like a hammock, curl up until all this is over. His earlobes look soft.

I’m Liz, I say. Every time I introduce myself, I wish I had a different name. The ratio of Zooey to me was always lopsided, beginning with names. Zooey to Liz, two syllables to one. Any given guy at a bar would rather talk to a Zooey. Jet-black, iron-straight hair to mousy brown frizz. Parenthetical curves to flat-all-the-way-down, linear me.

It’s nice to meet you, Ray says. We make small talk, developing a ratio of our own. Administrative assistant to middle school band teacher. Cat person to dog person. He leans toward me, his music note tie narrowly missing his bowl of bisque.

As he talks, a flame of suspicion begins to heat my cheeks: Zooey and Zach must have done this. I can see them sitting with their poster board seating chart, moving my name next to Ray’s, smiling at each other with a knowing look. A quick survey of the table confirms we’re flanked by couples. A quick survey of Ray’s delicate musician fingers reveals no ring.

I’ll be right back, I say, and head for the bar.

Zooey is kissing her grandmother at table eleven. Zach’s hand never leaves her waist.

The DJ announces the couple’s first dance, the dance they’ve been practicing around the apartment for weeks, counting out beats and stepping on each other’s toes. Sometimes they’d practice at Zach’s place, and I’d sit in the apartment alone, watching the growing shadows dance across the carpet in a slow midnight waltz. That first night, the first time she didn’t come home, I couldn’t sleep, my ears prickling at every noise. I went in the bathroom, closed the door, and lay in my claw-footed bathtub in the dark, watching the glow from the nightlight diffuse into the room. I opened up my mouth to catch some of it.

When they move together for their first dance, it looks perfect, better than even their best rehearsal. In my peripheral vision I see Ray watching me, and my face and chest break into a flush. After the first dance, everyone is invited to join in. Ray shifts in his seat, adjusting his tie. I push the last of my rosemary chicken and asparagus around on my plate, glancing over to see that Zooey and Zack’s plates are still full.

Do you want to dance? Ray smiles, and his earlobes lift.

Maybe in a little bit, I say, not looking at him.

Oh, he says. Okay. Maybe after the cake?

Sure. I tilt my head back to drain the last of my wine. I’m going to get another drink, I say. Do you want one?

No thanks, he says.

As I approach the bar, I tell the bartender, Surprise me. He raises his eyebrows and reaches for the vodka.

That kind of night, huh? he asks, but I don’t respond.

I stand by the bar to do the shot, setting the glass down on the counter and feeling the liquid spread warm red roots down into my belly.

A pair of arms wrap around me from behind, and I turn to face Zooey, who enfolds me in her white fabric, the train sweeping around our feet. For one second, I feel safe on her white boat.

Thank you for everything, she whispers. Are you having a good time?

Before I can answer, she pulls away, called to the dance floor by her sister.

Wait, I say, but the music has started up again.

What? she says, grinning. Oh—we’ve got to dance to this one!

She leads me to the dance floor. Ray watches us from table nine.

The alcohol seems to help my limbs move in time with Zooey’s, but soon other girls are crowding in and she’s singing along with her sister, Girls just wanna have fu-uunnn!

Cyndi Lauper dissolves into a slow song. Zach slides over to Zooey, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze on his way.

As I turn to head back to the bar, I bump nose-to-nose into Ray.

Sorry! I exclaim. Sorry.

Stop apologizing, he says, his tone chiding but light: must be how he talks to his middle schoolers. You want to dance now? he asks.

Yeah, okay, I say. Ray smells soft, like dryer sheets. The music must click inside of him because he keeps good time. I lean into him.

By the time the DJ is calling, Last dance!, I see spinning ribbons of sky blue and champagne winding across the room. Without warning, Zooey and Zach are saying their goodbyes and making their way toward the limo.

She and Zach walk through a stream of rose petals, and she reaches out to squeeze my hand, leans over to kiss me. The touch of her lips vibrates across my cheek as she’s walking away. Bye sweetie, she says.

Bye Zooey, I say to her retreating figure. Zach winks at me and gives me the thumbs up.

As the door closes, I wave goodbye to Zooey sailing away in a white limo, slow motion, the sound of jangling cans echoing in its wake. Then everyone is focused on getting their coats and going home. They all turn and begin filing inside, ready to collapse into homes, into beds that have another person in them. A hand finds the crook of my waist and turns me around.

Hey, Ray says. You okay? He holds me up as I begin to wobble in my heels. I relent and lean against him as we walk back inside. He has miraculously found a tissue for me to wipe off my wet cheeks and has found my tulips and my favor—a box of chocolates that all say Zooey and Zach.

Come on, he says. I’ll drive you home.

Ray guides me into my apartment. He must be used to rescuing. Rescuing his students when they’re not on tempo. Showing his kids how to make music out of brass and reeds and drums.

He opens the door and leads me inside. I knew it would look like this, but I’m still surprised to see the walls blank, the couch gone, leaving new spaces like missing teeth. The moonlight spills onto the floor where before it landed on her couch. Strands of her hair would collect there, black rivers through a pink landscape. Zooey was all brightness and contrast. I am a sky blue girl in a thundercloud-dark, half-empty apartment.

I turn to Ray and wrap my arms around him so I don’t fall over. The whole room is swirling, and I press my lips tentatively to his earlobe. He is playing notes on me now, carrying me away from this place.

I close my eyes and imagine him beside me as morning yawns through the window. On the floor is my blue dress: a skin I’ve shed.

Anne Wagener lives and works in the Washington, DC area. To survive the commute, she listens to books on tape and scribbles notes for stories at stoplights (and occasionally while the car is moving). She is working on a collection of short stories.